Writing From Wonder

Day 1 of 100 Days of Divination

Welcome to Day 1 of this 100-day writing challenge I’m doing alongside my friend Natalie Joanne of The Sacred Path.

Today’s writing prompt by Maria Popova:

when the gaze 
soft and curious 
extends past the common 
circumstances of being 
past all anxious 
thoughts of the future 
past the affinities 
of sterile probability 
the stony platform 
of the ordinary 
fissures into
a wide field of discovery 
and the eye of the mind 
glimpses wonder

—

Wonder does seem to be a widening of the field of perception, doesn’t it?

It’s not a place to which I travel but a broader context that is always available. As if I walk with blinders through much of my days, but always have the option to pull up a chair, remove them, tilt my head back to the firmament and open to the world.

An apt first pull for this 100-day challenge, as the challenge was born of my intention to write from wonder. I felt curious; what would happen if I showed up for this practice every day?

I have known for some time that writing from wonder is how I stoke the fire of my life force. Where I feed my love of life itself and where life loves me back. It’s where I slip into the feelings bubbling below my surface. Where I sort through the meaning of things.

To write from a place of wonder is to pray, to explore, and to let go. I can’t think of another practice that makes me feel closer to God.

I find myself smiling at the thought that my relationship with wonder is again in bloom. Just one year ago, I was riding the on-ramp of a spine injury—a disc displacement that would consume me in pain and numb my lower body in ways that still impact me daily.

When I work up the courage to revisit those memories, I see my saving grace was laying on my belly on a blanket in the yard, watching insects and birds between pages of The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl.

“Through the radical undoing and debilitation of repeated pain we are reacquainted with the essentialities of place and time and existence itself.”

— David Whyte

Essentialities, yes. I felt squeezed into a slot canyon with no room for wonder or forward movement. Just enough space to breathe and take in tiny flitting moments of appreciation.

The cardinal in the tree was a feathered, song-bearing thread to the greater context beyond circumstance. Isn’t it always?

I am tired of talking about this experience. And yet, it is an inescapable fissure in my story that shifted the gravity of my world. When the doctor said “you need surgery now…tonight or could lose your legs,” my compass no longer pointed north.

I was no longer walking toward anything but simply working to get my old gait back. Re-orienting. Landing in the grief that I may never return to the way things were.

I suppose the beauty of those times in our lives—the points of no return—is that we start looking for where we can go next.

We learn that we can open to the greater context of life and follow what we find there.

We can, as Popova suggests, widen our aperture from sterile probability, and once again, meet this life with wonder.

What’s more, we will do so with a newfound sense of reverence for the feathers and songs.

Theirs and ours.

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This is day 1 of our 100 day challenge. Share your own response to the prompt in the comments below and join our chat for accountability and discussion.